Blog at the Ballast

As we're in the middle of having our offices painted, I still can't scan any new photos so here is an image Dan McDonald took of  a windmill in August 1930 from the set of pictures I put up this week. **UPDATE** thanks to the power of twitter I found out on Friday that this windmill is called Oranjemolen and was a grain mill built...

Continue Reading

We are at the start of being redecorated so I'm unable to continue with the images of yards and workshops as planned because our scanner has been packed away.  Instead here are some images from the Dan McDonald collection taken in either Holland or Belgium in August 1930. Although Dan McDonald's collection is best known for his images of ships.  There is also...

Continue Reading

Recently we have been adding some images from the Dan McDonald collection onto our page at HistoryPin. The website is a great opportunity to look to our past, by pinning pictures from years gone by on a map identifying the location. It's even more fascinating when we can locate a building on Google street view, which allows you to view the street as...

Continue Reading

Today's Friday photo is from a set of images we have for Beardmore's Dalmuir Yard.  One of the things we inherited at the Trust from Bill are a few filing cabinets full of prints of ships and yards that he collected over the years.  There is a whole drawer full of images from different shipyards and engine works and I've decided to make...

Continue Reading

We have a new logo for the Ballast Trust which we are starting to use on everything. It has been designed to be a simpler, cleaner version of the original logo which was put together very quickly when I started in 2009. The first logo was created using wordle and was intended to get across all the different things that the Ballast Trust does....

Continue Reading

Today I'm giving a talk on the value of Twitter for Archives and Archivists as part of the ARA Scotland Born (Digital) Identity conference in Stirling. I've previously thought that there was no point to the Ballast Trust being on Twitter mainly because we don't have our own collections to highlight.  However, while I was preparing my talk I realised that there are...

Continue Reading